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Guest · Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 4:17 am Post subject: Cheery Article

Quite the clever lot aren't we.....always have been, it would appear.

Care
Charlie

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Excerpt:

Full article (long) at:

http://countercurrents.org/kotke120907.htm

By William M. H. Kötke

12 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org

We are all looking at the end of the world as we know it. Our attention
is focused on the holes in the ozone layer, planet warming, peak oil,
the spread of DU weapons, the collapse of the house of credit cards,
and the prospect of the planetary financial elite quickly establishing
fascist control of the planet. Below this threshold of conscious
awareness our biological survival systems are rapidly eroding. At this
point some twenty percent of the planet’s soils erode each twenty-five
year period. Each year at least two hundred thousand acres of irrigated
crop-lands go out of production because of salinization or
water-logging and experts say that sixty to eighty percent of all
irrigated acreage is due to follow the eight to ten million acres that
have historically gone into ruination from irrigation. The total
drylands of the planet are 7.9 billion acres of which 61% are
desertified, that is, driven by human abuse toward uselessness.
Globally, 23% of all arable crop lands have been lost since 1945
through human use and experts say that all arable land on the planet
will be ruined in 200 years.

It is estimated that prior to the human culture that we term
civilization, one third of the planet was covered with closed canopy
forest. Now forests cover 10% of the earth. In the oceans the collapse
of major fish stocks is increasing. At least eight stocks have
collapsed beginning with the Antarctic Blue Whale in 1935 to the
Peruvian Anchovy stock collapse in the late twentieth century. Since
1984 the world fish catch has been shrinking even with greater
investment and the taking of what in former times were considered
“trash” fish. Of the 32 ocean fisheries, 30 are in decline and some of
those are collapsing. At the same time coral reefs and mangrove swamps
which are considered the “incubators” of sea life are dwindling
precipitously.

Soil is the basis of the planetary terrestrial life. In the best of
circumstances such as old growth forests and prairies, soil builds at
the rate of one inch each three hundred to a thousand years. It is
being exhausted and is eroding away. The way that the industrial system
has continued to increase the food supply is by trading off soil
fertility for fossil fuel energy through artificial fertilizers. Now,
nearly half of the world’s people eat because of the added production
of food caused by artificial fertilizers being injected into depleted
soils and the use of all of the other accouterments of fossil- fueled
industrial agriculture.. Half of the planetary population are hanging
out on a limb essentially eating petroleum! Now as the population
continues to explode we reach peak oil and its decline. We do not need
to continue filling in the details. Our intellect can draw the
conclusion for us. An exponentially exploding world population with
increasing material consumption, based on dwindling resources and a
dying planet, won’t work!

But this is not a new phenomenon as some would assume. This culture of
civilization, of empire, was an ecological catastrophe when it began
some eight thousand years ago. It is this culture and its inculcated
reality-view that is the disaster. Half of China was once a great
temperate zone forest. That forest was gone before recorded history,
destroyed by the Han Chinese Empire. The Indus River Valley Empire had
ecologically destroyed its habitat before recorded history. We do have
recorded history of the Sumerian and Babylonian empires. We know they
decimated the forests and overgrazed the landscape. One third of the
land in Iraq that should be arable right now is still so salinized from
imperial irrigation four and five thousand years ago that it cannot be
used. The erosion material coming down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
from that destroyed watershed has filled in 185 miles of the gulf. As
we follow the history of this type of human culture we find the
Mid-East ecologically denuded. The empires of Greece and Rome used
Turkey and North Africa as “breadbaskets.” Now, there are towns in
Turkey, North Africa and even in Italy that were port cities during
those empires which are now ten and fifteen miles from the water - all
filled in with erosion material from the ecologically destroyed
landscapes. Then we go on to the destruction of the great forests of
Europe and now the whole world. These examples and many more are
indelible effects on the world ecosystem which have not recovered in
thousands of years.

William Wagner · Guest

In article <4fsge3t2cp6cekhr0qpca828abpfihch56@4ax.com>, Charlie wrote:

doofy · Guest

markferon wrote: